Hacker News Reader

I am wondering where sulphur-crested cockatoo are on the scale. Before seeing some in freedom up close in Australia, I never realized they actually could grab objects with their claws like they are hands and put them in their mouth.

They seemed very smart to me. I wonder if they lose to crow only because they are less prevalent around most labs in the world...

View on HN

Here is a video of a sulphur-crested cockatoo, very determinedly pushing a brick off a rubbish bin in order to be able to access its contents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOpFZYVpezI

It's quite incredible to me, the way it seems to understand the physics of the brick quite well.

Parrots get mentioned all the time in animal intelligence research. Normally the experiments take different forms: you keep one parrot in captivity and teach it to speak, while you observe the behaviour of groups of crows in the wild.

I highly recommend this book, written by two American ornithologists watching kea in the field for years:

https://www.amazon.com/Kea-Bird-Paradox-Evolution-Behavior/d...

What surprised me witht he cuckatoo was its size. I think typical parrots are smaller. Now I know the size-intelligence relationship is very tenuous, but within a similar order, it may have a value?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com